Early Black Friday sales have officially begun, so now’s the time to start looking for bargains. We’ve got all of the best Black Friday deals here, plus advice and tips to help you find the best discounts.
Black Friday has officially begun. The day itself is on 23 November, but retailers have kicked off their sales already so it looks like 2018 is going to have bigger bargains and better discounts than ever before.
Retailers will offer huge deals, discounts and sales both in store and online to get the deal-hungry shopper within us all to spend money. UK customers spend millions on Black Friday every year on everything from TVs and lawnmowers to nappies and candles. You’ll find anything you can think of at a discount.
Our team of tech experts – who review products and write about tech all year long – are already scouring the web to bring you only the very best Black Friday deals on only the best products – to help make sure you don’t miss out. We also bring you everything you need to know about Black Friday, and how to get the most out of it.
If you’re on the hunt for bargains already, you will be pleased to hear that there are loads available from retailers across the UK and beyond. Deals have started earlier than ever, with some retailers offering price promises to encourage you to start spending.
You’ll find our top 10 early Black Friday deals below, followed by everything you need to know about Black Friday this year.
Here, we’ve got a list of the early Black Friday sales events in the UK. Click the links to go straight to the retailer’s Black Friday page.
Every year Black Friday falls the day after Thanksgiving. This year that means Black Friday is 23 November, with Cyber Monday falling on 26 November, and Black Friday weekend sales going on the whole time between them.
But as we’ve already mentioned, retailers have kicked off their sales early so what was once a single day has become almost a whole month of bargains. Some retailers will actually keep their discounts going right through until Christmas, so it’s not strictly limited to November, either.
Don’t worry though, we’re on hand to let you know when retailers kick off their deals events so you won’t miss a thing, because the deals start now!
After a holiday of giving thanks for family, friends and settled life, American retailers opted to juxtapose Thanksgiving with a huge day of commercial spending. Who were we Brits to resist the allure of heavily discounted items too?
It is debated whether or not Black Friday refers to a day retailers finally went ‘into the black’, meaning they finally made profit for the year thanks to heightened sales, or whether it actually has morphed from a description of horrible traffic in Philadelphia on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
When Black Friday first gained huge popularity about ten years ago, it was usual to see newsreel of people physically fighting over big TVs in the middle of Walmart (or Asda in the UK, who has now actually opted to not take part because of the mayhem).
You can’t blame them really, as scenes often got out of hand at shops. But Black Friday has passed beyond trivial now as it has moved online, and it is serious business for retailers.
UK shoppers spent nearly £2bn on Black Friday 2016, a lot of it on discounted technology such as phones, cameras, TVs and Fitbits, and some reports had Black Friday 2017 spending up by another 11 percent on the year before. Indeed John Lewis had its busiest ever single hour of online trading on Friday last year.
Oh yes, and after Black Friday there is Cyber Monday, so-called after retailers realised people go back to work on Monday and kept spending online at their desks.
We might as well call it Black Friday Weekend though, because Saturday and Sunday don’t escape either – it’s four solid days of relentless spending, savings and tempting deals. Gulp.
Tech is a big draw on Black Friday, and not just because a lot of people are buying from behind computer or smartphone screens. If you’ve been waiting to spend on a new phone, particularly if you are buying the handset outright, you might be waiting for a Black Friday deal.
In the digital age, we’re spending less and less timing heading out to the physical shops to grab a bargain, instead choosing to shop online from the comfort of our own home. Which means there’s lots of opportunities to make the most out of technology and internet-based tools that’ll give you access to brilliant deals that you probably wouldn’t find on the high street.
Amazon is one of the best places to go for Black Friday deals, and it usually kicks off its annual Black Friday sale a bit early – last year it started on 17 November, with discounts on the new Echo 2 and Echo Dot. The best Amazon offers are usually on its own products, like the Echo smart speakers, Fire tablets, or Kindle e-readers, but it also offers some big price drops across the site – especially through its short-lived Lightning Deals.
We’d recommend signing up to Amazon’s 30-day Amazon Prime free trial. It will get you free next day delivery (although it sometimes takes a little longer during the Black Friday rush) but will also get you access to Lightning Deals 30 minutes before those who aren’t Prime members. Some Lightning Deals are so great that they sell out before that 30 minutes are up so without the Prime membership or free trial you may find you miss out completely.
We’ll be bringing you the best Amazon deals across our deals site and the articles listed below to make sure you’re spotting the very best deals (there are so many on Amazon that it can be hard to find what you’re looking for) and also to make sure you couldn’t get a better deal elsewhere. Bookmark the articles you’re most interested in and check back regularly for our pick of the best deals in that category.
Carphone Warehouse and others such as Mobile Phones Direct also have a lot of decent smartphone deals, be it on contract or SIM-only. Given that we now have excellent handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S9, iPhone X, and OnePlus 6 you can expect retailers to offer some very tempting deals. We’ve gathered all of the best phone deals here.
Last November also saw the Xbox One X go on sale, so many gamers among you will be on the look out for a bargain. Games consoles are often part of genuinely decent discounts, with many PS4 bundles going for under £200 last year. The hottest gaming bundles last year were for the PlayStation VR and Xbox One S, but Switch offers also sold out fast – we’d expect all of those to be big again this year, along with the first real discounts on the Xbox One X.
Meanwhile, places like Currys PC World discount 4K TVs, sometimes by hundreds of pounds.
Below is a list of all of our individual deals pages for your convenience:
And here’s a list of our favourite places to shop for Black Friday deals:
We’d recommend coming up with a list of your favourite brands and following them on social media. Sign up to their newsletters, and sign up to ours too. We have a dedicated deals newsletter that we send out every Friday, and over the Black Friday period we’ll be sending it out even more to make sure you don’t miss out.
